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Still dressed in her swim cap and suit, 10-year-old Maria Sheridan sat on the steps outside the Shelby Aquatics Center in Shelby, N.C., tears streaming down her face. Minutes earlier, the buzzer signaling the start of the 50 Freestyle — her best race — had sounded. She'd heard it from the block, where she stood on her mark, ready to dive into the pool. Only she didn't dive in with the other swimmers. The sound of the buzzer is the last thing Maria remembers before zoning out into a seizure.

Not all seizures look the way they do on TV, with a person's entire body convulsing. In fact, many people don't even fall to the ground or lose consciousness. That can happen, but not always. Instead, someone experiencing a partial seizure might blink, stare, or twitch and then appear completely fine afterward. For Maria, seizures come in blinking spells.

"Let's go home," her mother, Ann, whispered. But Maria still had one more race, one more chance — albeit an unrealistic one, she says — to make the cut for the state meet. As she approached the block for the 100 Butterfly, a group of supporters lined up behind her lane. She finished with the time she needed to a roar of cheers from her posse — and proud tears from her mom.

"That was when I decided I'm not going to let this affect anything in my life. It was a giant turning point," Maria, now 16, says of her early swimming career.

Swimming Passed Seizures

The seizures started when Maria was 9. At school, she'd have blinking spells throughout the day. Ann took her to a neurologist, and Maria underwent the first of many EEGs. EEG stands for electroencephalography, a name most 9-year-olds can't even pronounce. A technician glues probes to a patient's scalp to record brain waves during activities like sleeping, sitting still, looking into a strobe light, or breathing into a pinwheel (a trick used for younger patients) to stimulate hyperventilation. Maria had a seizure during the pinwheel portion of that EEG, confirming the diagnosis: epilepsy.

Epilepsy is a neurological condition characterized by seizures. It affects more than 300,000 children younger than 15, according to the Epilepsy Foundation, based in Landover, Md.

In the years that followed, Maria cycled through a handful of seizure drugs. One medication altered her mood, while others messed with her eating habits. All the while she continued having seizures, but she kept swimming.

"Swimming made me happier, it kept me consistent," she says. "I wanted to go to practice and see my friends."

Since joining her first league at age 6, Maria loved swimming — although she needed to work at it. "I wasn't really good," Maria says with a chuckle, but she started swimming competitively two years later. Even at such a young age, before seizures, meds, and EEGs entered the picture, Maria's attitude made her stand out. And that same attitude helped turn "Why me?" into "Why not?" when they did.

"When she was younger she would, on occasion, have absence seizures while swimming. She'd get out, make sure she was OK, and then determined, would get back in," says Ann.

Armed with her unflappable attitude, Maria continued swimming and improving her times. She trained and trained, and when she missed a cut, she trained again until the next meet.

When she set a goal to make it to the U.S. Olympic Swimming trials ("Why not?"), that's exactly what she did. After more than a dozen attempts, Maria made the cut on her last chance — three weeks before the 2012 Olympic Trials.

From ‘Why Me?' to ‘Why Not?'

"This is the coolest thing I've ever done in my life," Maria remembers thinking as she soaked in every second of the last 10 meters of her race, the 100 Butterfly, at the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials in Omaha, Neb., last month. She didn't make the Olympic team and didn't expect to, not this time, at least. Just being there felt like a dream. Maria could talk forever about the cool gear, the size of the arena, the TVs in the waiting room, the National Guard, and the officials.

Maria says she has a great group of friends who never treated her differently because of epilepsy, but when the lows of living with a chronic illness — the logistics of getting approved for a driver's license, for instance — get her down, swimming keeps her strong.

"A lot of people can't relate. It's so different from what other people go through, so it's hard to talk to someone about it," she says. "I talk to my sister [who also has epilepsy] about it but, I found that swimming really got me through."

The high school junior plans to keep swimming through college and hopes to make the U.S. Olympic team one day. Why not?